1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to printing methods and systems and, more particularly, to printing services in a communications network.
Copyright & Trademark Notice
A portion of the disclosure of this patent document contains material, which is subject to copyright protection. The owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by any one of the patent document or the patent disclosure, as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office patent file or records, but otherwise reserves all copyrights whatsoever.
Certain marks referenced herein may be common law or registered trademarks of third parties affiliated or unaffiliated with the applicant or the assignee. Use of these marks is by way of example and shall not be construed to limit the scope of this invention to material associated with such marks.
2. Related Art
Currently, to print one or more documents a user interacts with a computing system such as a personal computer or a computer terminal connected to a computer network. Using the computing system the user submits a print request for printing one or more pages of the document. When one or more print requests are submitted to a single printer, the print requests are queued up. The printer then processes each request in order of priority. Computer software can be executed on the computing system to allow a user to manipulate the printing order for each request, to pause the printing process, or to delete a print request from the queue.
Unfortunately, once a print request is submitted and the print data is transferred to the printer, the user loses control over the printing process. In other words, documents that are entered into the print queue are typically printed without the user having a chance to decide when he wishes for the printing process to start, or end, for that matter. This lack of control over the printing process is undesirable, especially when the printer is not within the immediate vicinity of the computing system where the print request is generated. For example, in the case of a shared network printer, multiple print requests may be submitted by multiple users. Some or all these users may be unable to immediately retrieve the printed results, due to time or distances constraints.
Furthermore, without the intervention of a human operator, in most instances printing to a shared printer can be chaotic. For example, the users will have to sort through the multiple printed material to ensure that they pick the printed material and pages that belong to them. Also, processing and printing large files occasionally may take a very long time, and one user with a smaller print job may have to wait for a larger print job to finish if the print request for the smaller job was received after the print request for the larger job. It would be very useful, if the users had the option to control the printing process at the printing location by interacting with the printing device.
A system and method that provides for multiple users to submit multiple print requests to a shared printer first and later choose the printing time and order at the printing site are desirable.